After a summer that was mostly focused on moving, packing, cleaning, unpacking, repacking, and cleaning some more, I'm finally getting settled into my new office, new job, new home, and new city in South Carolina. I teach my first class this afternoon (ANTH 101 -- "Primates, People, and Prehistory") and I'll be working to quickly get up to speed on the archaeology of the region and begin transforming my southern research agenda from a collection of ideas into a concrete reality. I hope to get back to making regular blog posts as well. My initial goal is to write at least once per week.

One of the first things I need to do now that I have desk space again is to make corrections to the proofs of an essay that I wrote last spring for Reviews in Anthropology. In the essay (titled "Chaos, Complexity, and Revitalization of Four-Field Anthropology?") I argue that complexity science is well-suited to the holistic study of human cultural systems because it allows you to consider environment, history, and process at the same time. I've never liked reading something that I've written, so I've been putting off actually going through it (the proofs are due back on the 25th, though, so it's got to happen soon). Anyway, I think there are good reasons why four field anthropology exists and I don't think we should discard the concept just because it's difficult. I consider myself an anthropologist first and an archaeologist second.

Earlier this week I saw this anonymous blog post titled "Why Archaeology Needs a Divorce from Anthropology" that seems to argue just the opposite: archaeology and anthropology do not work well and play nicely together and should therefore be split apart. The idea of "irreconcilable differences" among the sub-fields is not a new one. I'm sure the observations in the "divorce" post resonate with a lot of people.

The problem, however, is that the metaphor of "divorce" is misplaced. It's a nice rhetorical device, sure, but it misleads by portraying four field anthropology as a marriage of choice. It's not. The four fields of anthropology as academic sub-disciplines by which we identify are, or course, "together" because we organize them that way. But cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, linguistics, and archaeology were not just combined together randomly or haphazardly into "anthropology" in the late 1800s. They coalesced as nominal sub-disciplines each more-or-less focused on one aspect of the complex, inter-related whole that is the study of humans. They are together because they have to be: no single sub-field of anthropology will ever be able to credibly claim it is doing good "anthropology" all by itself.

Even at its beginnings, however, it was evident that the four sub-fields (those nominal, somewhat artificial categories of study distilled from the complex, inter-related human whole) would have to consciously work to stay together. Franz Boas, one of the founders of American anthropology, understood that natural tendencies toward fragmentation could rip the discipline apart (see this post about an interesting paper by Dan Hicks exploring the origins of four field anthropology). Boas resisted fragmentation then, and we should resist it now.

The short version of my argument is that the four sub-fields are not "married" by choice and cannot, therefore, get a "divorce." They belong together whether or not you like it, whether or not you're comfortable disagreeing with colleagues, and whether or not you can individually appreciate and understand the value of what anyone else is doing. They belong together because they are all ultimately studying inter-related aspects of the same phenomenon. Sure, we can study language "all by itself" and we can do archaeology without talking to linguists, but I don't think we can really claim to be doing anthropology as a credible discipline if we let it fragment. The past matters. History matters. Culture matters. Environment matters. Biology matters.

I recommend we replace the "divorce" metaphor with one that is more fitting: how about "dismantle," "demolish," "disassemble," or even "gut." Those kinds of metaphors would do a better job, I think, of conveying the ramifications of splitting the organic whole of anthropology into its constituent parts for the sake of getting along better at the copy machine. The central nervous system, the musculoskeletal system, and the circulatory system can each be studied independently, but you can't really understand the human body without understanding all of them and how they are inter-related (and the "divorce" of the circulatory system from the rest of the body would be a pretty messy affair). It is no more possible to amicably "divorce" archaeology from anthropology than it is possible to amicably "divorce" your brain from your body. I'm pretty sure the ill effects of either will far outweigh any short-term benefits.

I'm currently writing an essay for Reviews in Anthropology with a working title of “Chaos, Evolution, and Complexity Science: Catalyzing a Revitalization of Four-Field Anthropology?” I think that complex systems theory offers a powerful set of tools for integrating the various components of American four-field anthropology: physical anthropology, archaeology, cultural anthropology, and linguistics. That's the argument I'm going to make in the essay.

Doing some research on the original goals of four-field anthropology, I came across an interesting article by Dan Hicks entitled "Four-Field Anthropology: Charter Myths and Time Warps from St. Louis to Oxford (Current Anthropology 54(6): 753-763). Hicks looks at the origins of four-field anthropology, tracing some of its aspects back to the 1870s (i.e., pre-Boas) using documentary evidence. I don't know about all of you, but I was taught as an undergrad that Franz Boas was more-or-less the founder of four-field American anthropology. "Papa Franz" is a cultural hero to American anthropologists, standing for relativism and against racism, training many of the influential anthropologists of the early 20th century, and posing for the famous hoop photo shown above. His Wikipedia entry clearly states his founding role:

"By uniting the disciplines of archaeology, the study of material culture and history, and physical anthropology, the study of variation in human anatomy, with ethnology, the study of cultural variation of customs, and descriptive linguistics, the study of unwritten indigenous languages, Boas created the four field subdivision of anthropology which became prominent in American anthropology in the 20th century."

Figure 1 from Hicks' (2013) paper, showing Pitt-Rivers' (1882) drawing of his vision of the structure of the discipline of anthropology.

It turns out that the notion of Boas as a "creator" may be more mythology than reality. Using documentary evidence, including a drawing by Augustus Pitt-Rivers (an English archaeologist and ethnologist) and the work of Paul Broca (a French physician and anthropologist perhaps most famous for his work on brain function), Hicks traces the development of the concept of a subdivided anthropology back to the 1870s. This is well before Boas' celebrated papers of the 1890s and early 1900s which many scholars identify as the "founding" documents of four-field anthropology.

I really appreciated Hicks' approach to primary source material. He questions the historical accuracy of the mythology that has developed about Boas and his role in founding our discipline, and he does so by identifying a developmental sequence that is preserved in material remains (in this case, documents). It is a very archaeological way to look at history, and very similar to the approach I am using to try to understand the various incarnations of the ancient giants phenomenon.

I am convinced by Hicks' paper that the idea of four-field anthropology has a history that extends well prior to Boas. While Boas' importance to the development of the four-field approach in America is not in dispute, I love that Hicks' paper demonstrates the usefulness of material remains for questioning mythology and trying to understand where ideas come from. That's good stuff.